Clean Suits and Air Conditioned Rooms
by threedays
Summary: He shakes his head slow, forehead sliding back and forth against his arm, never taking his weight back from the damaged wall. "Nothin'. Nothin's wrong. Everything's peachy."


_A/N: You can guess their ages here. I'm thinking maybe 13 and 17-ish?_

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><p><strong>Clean Suits and Air-Conditioned Rooms<strong>

Dean punches the wall once, twice, three times. Hard.

Sounds like it hurts.

But he doesn't make a noise, he just stands there with his knuckles braced against the cracked drywall and his forehead pressed above the crack and he's breathing hard, _in-out, in-out, in-out_ with little hiccupy pauses in between.

I don't know what to do, so I stay frozen next to the broken air conditioner, which has turned out to be the final straw.

It's like a hundred degrees in this stinkin' room and when I say stinkin' I mean for real, because there's my dirty laundry and Dean's and Dad's , and socks all over the floor and food rotting in the sink that won't drain and something nasty dried onto the carpet next to the bathroom and the walls are sweating. Dad's been gone an hour or two, should be back any time, he's only researching at the library, and I don't know what he's going to say about the busted wall. Right away my brain starts working on what we can do to hide it, moving a plant, hanging a picture, except we don't have any plants or pictures and anyway they'd look as out of place in this room as … well, as Dad looks at a library.

Anyway it's not like I can say any of this to Dean. Not with him looking so freaked out, leaning on the wall like it's holding him up.

It occurs to me that maybe the wall is holding Dean up.

It occurs to me that maybe something is wrong with Dean.

I don't know. I haven't gotten much out of him since he and Dad got back. All I know is they didn't get the thing they were looking for, and Dad left to do some more research so they could go out again, which means another few days alone in this motel room for me, which I hate.

And, okay, so I've let things get a little out of hand these last few days. The laundry and the dishes. Stupid extended-stay motel room, in all its dingy glory, doesn't seem that important when your family's out fighting, maybe dying, and they haven't called home in two days and you're so worried that you flunk a pre-algebra test even though you could do that stuff with your eyes glued shut –

If anybody ought to be punching the wall, it's me. Because they scared me, not calling. And they scared me again, showing up all quiet. And now Dean's scaring me, beating up the wall, and all I did was welcome him home and ask him where the hell he'd been and why the hell hadn't he called, and tell him I'd been too hot to clean because the AC was on the fritz and then he just – he just cracked, like the drywall. Starting swinging.

Dean doesn't even freakin' _care_ if the room is clean. So I don't get it.

I give him a few minutes to get sorted out – _in … out _ instead of _in-out, in-out, in-out_ – and then I say, "Dean?"

He blows a long breath of air through his lips and does not look at me. "Yeah, Sammy."

"What's'a matter?"

He shakes his head slow, forehead sliding back and forth against his arm, never taking his weight back from the damaged wall.

"Nothin'. Nothin's wrong. Everything's peachy."

Fuck. I hate when he – "Dean?"

"Leave it, Sam."

I do.

We stand still for a minute and then when Dean never moves, I start moving around the motel room, picking up laundry. I wrap it in the bedspread to make it easy to carry, and I drag it down the long, hot sidewalk to the scuzzy laundry room. The fluorescent lights are just flickering on with a dull buzz to reveal the silhouettes of bug bodies dead inide their shades. It takes half a damn hour to find enough quarters, squirreled away in pockets like treasure, and pressed into the dryer lint behind the machines, with the spiders and the cigarette butts. Eventually the clothes are running, water hot as it'll go because there's no soap, and everything's gray anyway so it doesn't matter if the colors bleed. Won't be the first thing bleeding on those clothes.

By the time the laundry's ready to go in the dryer, I've washed all the dishes we own, which is five: three coffee mugs, and a plate and a fork we take turns using. I use the fork to dig a glob of something nasty out of the sink drain, then wash the fork again. By now Dean's sitting on the bed. He's got the TV on. He still hasn't spoken. I get down on my hands and knees with an old sock and I scrub the nasty spot out of the carpet.

I get the clothes out of the dryer. They're still sort of wet, jeans damp at the pockets, shirts still moist under the arms and on the cuffs of the sleeves. I hang the worst of them over the shower curtain rod and chuck everything else onto the floor of the closet. And _still,_ Dean hasn't spoken.

I leave the front door open so the breeze can stir. I stick a piece of duct tape over the hole in the wall. With any luck, Dad won't notice. But the walls are still sweating and the tape won't stick right. Its edges curl.

The library closed an hour ago, but Dad's still not back.

I sit on the bed next to Dean and look at the TV, even though it's the news and neither one of us can stand the news because it's not terribly accurate. People with clean suits in air-conditioned rooms report animal maulings and random acts of violence and electrical fires, never doubting the false stories they're telling. And anyway the TV's muted and Dean's not really looking at it, just somewhere past it. I've got a stomachache and even though it's dusk outside, it feels like it's getting hotter in this room.

The tape falls off the wall.

I test my voice. "What happened, Dean?"

He doesn't look at me and doesn't look at me and doesn't look at me, and then he does.

"I let it get away," he says, not cracked like the wall now but gray like the laundry. "It killed a guy."

"Oh."

After a long, long minute during which I cannot look away from his eyes and the way they are creased at the corners in a permament wince, and during which he doesn't seem to want to look away from me either, we turn at the same instant back to the TV.

After a while, Dean picks up the remote and hits unmute. I know he's still not watching though, because he doesn't get annoyed when I go back and forth in front of the TV, wiping the dust off the dresser, cleaning smudges off the mirrors, straightening the bedspreads. Scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing this dim little space that will never come clean.

I work half the night and fall asleep fully-clothed, stretched across the foot of the bed with the TV prattling somewhere near my ear. There are soft sounds in my sleep, whispers and scuffs and gently-closing doors, and when I wake, too hot and with a crick in my neck, I find myself alone.

There is nothing to do except climb out of bed and put the tape back on the wall. Then wait.


End file.
